In baseball, Lowell had most always been the champion. Her basketball and hockey teams were only beaten when outlucked; her crew was beaten but twice in twenty years. Only in football did she seem to fall behind. Year after year she would get a team together that would win its way through the games with the other schools in the East, hardly ever scored against, only to fall before her old time rival college in the West in the final game of the year. This happened in spite of the fact that all of the cunning and ability of her coaches, captains and managers were used to get a team together that could beat Jefferson College. But this past fall they had finally turned the trick against Jefferson and won for the first time in five years. Half-back last year and Captain and Half-back this year, good old Hughie Jenkins who had won the baseball Championship three times, had done it, and now he was back after the Christmas vacation, and when he had time to think about something besides his studies he would be thinking about baseball and the gaps in last year’s winner that would have to be filled because the old standbys like Fred Penny, Johnny King, Joe Brinker and others had been graduated. “Well,” said Hughie one evening about the middle of January, to his roommate and chum, Johnny Everson, “I have about five weeks before the 15th of February to dream that the new fellows who think they can play ball are going to be as good as the old boys and I am going to have another winner this year, if--well, we just have to win the Championship this year, that’s all.” Little did he know that among those who had seen him on the day he got back after the holidays, were almost a half dozen boys who had been in school only five months who would make the Varsity this year, and whose names would be written very near the top of the Roll of Honor in Lowell’s Hall of Fame, and that another fellow, one who was destined to be greater than all the rest, had not yet arrived. CHAPTER III GETTING ACQUAINTED Harold Case mounted the stairs of his boarding house to the little hall room that he had called home for the last five months. It had been his first time away from home and he was lonesome and maybe just a little homesick, for he had come all the way from California to attend school at Lowell. Though he was a poor boy, he had never had to look out for himself before. Perhaps his room--there was only one small one--helped to make him lonesome. It was comfortably furnished and the meals which Mrs. Malcolm served her student boarder were good, but this was Harold’s first white winter. He had lived all of his eighteen years in the balmy climate of the Golden State, and he missed the warm sun and the bright green of the orange leaves and the yellow fruit which he had been used to back home, and he hadn’t become accustomed to wearing overcoat and rubbers yet as they did every day here in the East.